LAND AND SOVEREIGNTY IN INDIA (SOUTH ASIA EDITION)

This original contribution to Indian history focusing on contemporary and largely indigenous documents introduces a set of concepts for the analysis of late Mughal rule. More specifically it examines the origins and development of the Maratha svarajya or ‘self-rule’ within the context of declining Muslim power. It traces the expansion of Maratha dominion to a process of fitna a policy of ‘shifting alliances’ which was recurrent in the wake of Muslim expansion throughout its history but which is here analysed from a dual perspective of both the declining Muslim dominion and of the rising gentry and nobility of local provenance. In doing so the argument of the book runs against many of the established notions which point at discontinuity in the precolonial order in India particularly against the notion of an all-powerful and monolithic Muslim empire which suddenly gives way to widespread anarchy and agrarian revolt in the eighteenth century and which was thought to be epitomized by the Marathas of the Western Deccan. Emphasizing the dynamics of growth within local agrarian society the argument put forward here brings out important elements of continuity in the eighteenth-century Indian structure of sovereignty and the rise of gentry (zamindari) power and a Brahman bureaucracy next to conflictuous and pervasive change. The book therefore also gives an interesting perspective on Hindu-Muslim relationships in the pre-British period as well as on the nature of the Indo-Muslim state and its most important successor polity on its capacity for change and development in the intermediate sections of society the land-tenurial system the monetization of the economy and on the fiscal system.